We have greatly improved our knowledge of this topic from reading this book. It is a highly underfunded area as far as public facilities go and that at some facilities the patients are treated very unkindly and unfairly. Drug companies have a big say in what the hospitals give out to the patients; the doctors practically shove the drugs down the patients throats even if they do not need them. There is also a big misconception about the type of people in the facilities. For the most part, they are just normal human beings who have reached a "fork" in the road.
Considering the situation, we think that what she did was totally ethical. If she were to go into the facility and be upfront and say that "hey I'm doing research and not really mental" she wouldn't get the correct research and the patients would probably shun her or protest what she was doing. At the same time, the patients were kind of "exposed" and that is kind of unethical. She does take steps to protect his or her identity though, by giving them pseudonyms.
Vincent's main conclusion is that you have to want to get better to actually get better. You can't just expect to get better by staying in the hospital/facility. Getting better requires participation and the want to get better. "Happiness is my right as an American. Not it's pursuit, but it's persistance..." Also, getting better is something that you cannot do yourself. You need to have people around you; to care for you, to give you support, to love you. You can lean on other people and be vulnerable, because that is a step to achieving happiness and becoming on the right path.
We really don't think that this kind of information can be discovered any other way. You actually have to be in the mindset and be in the situation to get the correct information and research. A doctor could try to inform you about it, but in reality he only sees what goes on on the outside. He is on the outside looking in, which looks totally different than being on the inside looking out. For her book, Norah Vincent did the right thing by becoming one of the patients.
We think that to some degree the ethnography is successful, but not overall. Norah Vincent had a lot of biased opinions and that kind of made some of the points not as fair as they should be for an ethnography. To have a successful ethnography, biases should be completely erased. We did think that it was a good book to shed light on the situation because no one really talks about mental hospitals or mental patients.
